Physicians often prescribe medications requiring periodic ingestion by a patient. Products sold to patients over-the-counter, or without a practitioner's prescription, similarly typically mandate regular intake for optimal performance. Complying with these requirements necessitates that each patient recollect that doses of the medication previously were taken, as failure to do so may result in ingestion of more or less than the specified dosage during a particular period.
Many patients, however, are unable to remember or determine the amount of medication already taken over a given duration. This is especially true of certain elderly patients, who may experience short-term memory loss or, because their infirmities require ingestion of substantial numbers of different medications, confuse the dosage previously taken of each. Empirical evidence suggests that elderly glaucoma patients in particular are plagued by these problems. Combined with their decreased abilities to view the medication containers themselves, these glaucoma patients often have no means of determining whether they have taken the mandated doses.
The concept of using indicators or "medicine minders" has existed for many years. U.S. Pat. No. 710,708 to Mcshane, for example, describes at lines 8-13 a medicine bottle having
a scale of the full, half and quarter hours from 12 to PA1 11.45 o'clock, together with an indicator to indicate PA1 the time of taking the medicine therein contained.
A side of the specially-molded bottle contains a "flat-topped ridge" on which a time scale is printed and having grooves to receive the "gripping claws" of an indicator. The patient is instructed to move the indicator after each dose of medication is taken, positioning its index at the point on the scale corresponding to the time for taking the next dosage. The bottle does not indicate the number of doses either taken or remaining to be taken in a particular interval, however, thus neither preventing nor inhibiting overdoses. It further fails to assist glaucoma and other patients with poor (or no) vision in appropriately positioning the indicator after ingesting each dose.
More recently, U.S. Pat. No. 5,271,353 to Besthorne issued describing a medicine reminder device in which a housing having a clock face is attached, using an elastic band, to the cylindrical body of a medicine container. Mounted to the clock face are hour and minute hands. After taking medicine from the container, the patient resets the hands to indicate the time of the next dose. As with the medicine bottle of the McShane patent, however, the reminder device of the Besthorne patent provides no indication of the doses taken or to be taken. Likewise, it furnish patients no tactile or other non-visual assistance in appropriately repositioning the hands of the clock.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,511,050 to Nicol provides yet another type of dose indicator. Embodied in a two-piece cap, the indicator includes on one piece an embossed arrow or pointer and on the other graduated indicia. The cap is useful solely with threaded containers, however, and fails to indicate to the patient that the maximum doses have been taken during any given period.